Re: E and e (was: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful))

On Wed, 1 May 2002 19:54:34 +1000, Tristan <zsau@...> wrote:

>On Wed, 2002-05-01 at 16:04, Raymond Brown wrote:
>
>[snippage]
>
>> Of course, it may be that the phonemic theory is incorrect - but that's
>> another story  ;)
>
>What alternatives are there to phonemic theory? Phonemic theory seems
>pretty well accepted; in my relatively limited research (i.e. what I can
>do in my free time on the Net when it's of interest to me), I don't
>believe I've ever seen one. (A Google didn't appear to turn up anything
>relevant and readable. There was a PS file that might have had some
>stuff but GS (and ps2pdf) die when trying to process it.)
>
>(BTW: I haven't replied to Nik Taylor's post on the same topic as I
>think this one covers my feelings and confusions adequately enough. If
>I'm wrong, do tell. Always tell. I'm never trying to be stubborn, I'm
>trying to help you help me.)
>
>Tristan
There's a whole mess of newer phonology theories. Dirk and some others here
are experts on those.
As I understand it, Phonemics is not so much a scientific theory as an
"engineering tool" used in developing practical orthographies for languages
that don't have any. It doesn't have to be perfect, since extralinguistic
factors tend to interfere anyway. For some languages and dialects, the
phoneme set is obvious, while for others, you'd have to go through a whole
book of procedures to determine the phonemes. I suspect Melburnian is one
of the latter.

Jeff J.